THE NEW UNCONSCIOUS

Edited by Ran R. Hassin James S. Uleman John A. Bargh

OXFORD
UNIVERSITY PRESS

New York: 2005

Social Psy

cy: Experi . and Social Sources of

2
Bypassing the Will: Toward Demystifying the Nonconscious Control of Socia I Behavior
John A. Bargh

Paris, 1986: Doctor Lhermitte accompanies two patients of his to various locations around the city. Both of them had suffered a stroke, which had damaged portions of their prefrontal cortex, areas critical for the planning and control of action. First, in his office, the woman gives Dr. Lhermitte a physical exam using the available equipment and utensils. Later. after they spend a half hour in the professor's apartment, he escorts the two of them out to the balcony, casually mentions the word museum, and leads them back inside. Their behavior becomes suddenly different: they scrutinize with great interest the paintings and posters on the wall, as well as the common objects on the tables, as if each was an actual work of art. Next, the man enters the bedroom, sees the bed, undresses, and gets into it. Soon he is asleep. Across . these and several other situations, neither patient is able to notice or remark on anything unusual or strange about their behavior. New York, 1996: University students take part in an experiment on the effects of behavior-concept priming. As part of an ostensible language test, partici pants are presented with many words. For some participants, words synony mous with rudeness are included in this test; for others, words synonymous with politeness are included instead. After finishing this language test, all participants are sent down the hall, where they encounter a staged situation in which it is possible to act either rudely or politely. Although participants show no awareness of the possible influence of the language test, their subse quent behavior in the staged situation is a function of the type of words presented in that test. People are often unaware of the reasons and causes of their own behavior. In fact, recent experimental evidence points to a deep and fundamental disso
37

ciation between conscious awareness and the mental processes responsible for one's behavior; many of the wellsprings of behavior appear to be opaque to conscious access. That research has proceeded somewhat independently in social psychology (e.g., Dijksterhuis & Bargh, 2001; Wilson, 2002), cognitive psychology (e.g., Knuf, Aschersleber, & Prinz, 2001; Prinz, 1997), and neuro psychology (e.g., Frith, Blakemore, & Wolpert, 2000; [eannerod, 1999), but all three lines of research have reached the same general conclusions despite the quite different methodologies and guiding theoretical perspectives em ployed. This consensus has emerged in part because of the remarkable resem blance between the behavior of patients with some forms of frontal lobe dam age and (normal) participants in contemporary priming studies in social psy chology. In both cases, the individual's behavior is being "controlled" by external stimuli, not by his or her own consciously accessible intentions or acts of will. Both sets of evidence demonstrate that action tendencies can be activated and triggered independently and in the absence of the individual's conscious choice or awareness of those causal triggers. In the examples that opened this chapter, for Lhermitte's (1986) patients as well as our undergrad uate experimental participants (Bargh, Chen, & Burrows, 1996), individuals were not aware of the actual causes of their behavior. In this chapter, I compare and contrast lines of research relevant to the nonconscious control of individual social behavior-that is, behavior induced to occur by environmental factors and not by the individual's conscious awareness and intentions. Such factors include, but are not limited to, the presence, features, and behavior of another person or persons (such as inter action partners). These are the environmental triggers of the behavior, which then occurs without the necessity of the individual forming a conscious inten tion to behave that way, or even knowing, while acting, what the true pur pose of the behavior is (see Bargh & Chartrand, 1999). My main purpose is to help demystify these phenomena by showing how several very different lines of research are all converging on the same conclusions regarding the degree of conscious access to the operation and control of one's own higher mental processes. Another purpose is to demystify the seeming power over psychological and behavioral processes wielded by some simple words namely those that are synonymous with behavioral and motivational con cepts such as rude and achieve. These lines of relevant research come from social psychology as well as cognitive neuroscience, cognitive psychology, developmental psychology, and the study of hypnosis. Yet they converge on the same story: that, at best, we have imperfect conscious access to the basic brain/mind processes that help govern our own behavior, broadly defined (i.e., from the motoric to the social and motivational levels). This harmony between the growing evidence of nonconscious influences on social behavior and higher mental processes (e.g.,
38 Fundamental Questions

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Bargh & Ferguson, 2000; Wilson, 2002) on the one hand, and the neuropsy chological evidence from both imaging and patient research concerning exec utive functioning, working memory, and the control of action on the other (e.g., Baddeley, 2001; Fourneret & [eannerod, 1998: Frith et al., 2000), is reciprocally strengthening of the conclusions of both lines of research. Of course, there are key important differences between these two areas of research as well. For example, the fact that our undergraduate experimental participants could be induced by subtle priming manipulations to behave in one way or another does not mean they largely lack the ability to act autono mously, as Lherrnitte's patients did. The damage to those patients' prefrontal cortices greatly reduced their ability to behave in any way except those af forded through external, perceptual means, Yet the priming and the patient studies do complement and support each other in demonstrating the same two principles: that an individual's behavior can be directly caused by the current environment, without the necessity of an act of conscious choice or will; and that this behavior can and will unfold without the person being aware of its external determinant.

Social Psychology's Magical Mystery Tour

Two streams of research in social psychology have converged on the idea that complex social behavior tendencies can be triggered and enacted non consciously, One line of research focuses on ideomotor action or the percep tion-behavior link-the finding that mental content activated in the course of perceiving one's social environment automatically creates behavioral tenden cies (Prinz, 1997). Thus, for example, one tends to mimic, without realizing it, the posture and physical gestures of one's interaction partners (Char trand & Bargh, 1999), This "chameleon effect" has been found to extend even to the automatic activation of abstract, schematic representations of people and groups (such as social stereotypes) in the course of social perception (see Dliksterhuis & Bargh, 2001). For example, subtly activating (priming) the professor stereo type in a prior context causes people to score higher on a knowledge quiz, and priming the elderly stereotype makes college students not only walk more slowly but have poorer incidental memory as well (both. effects consistent with the content of that stereotype). Similarly, activating the African Ameri can stereotype (which includes the trait of hostility) through subliminal pre sentation of faces of young Black men causes young White participants to . react with greater hostility to a request by the experimenter. Thus, the passive activation of behavior (trait) concepts through priming . manipulations increases the person's tendency to behave in line with that concept, as long as such behavior is possible in the subsequent situation. It
Bypassing the Will 39

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is the tendency or predisposition to behave in a certain way that is created, but the situation must be appropriate or applicable (Higgins, 1996) for that behavior to be performed. The second stream of research has shown that social and interpersonal goals can also be activated through external means (as in priming manipula tions), with the individual then pursuing that goal in the subsequent situa tion without consciously choosing or intending to do so or even being aware even of the purpose of his or her behavior (Bargh, 1990; Bargh, Gollwitzer, Lee-Chai, Barndollar, & Troetschel. 2001). Again, all that is needed is for words or pictures closely related in meaning to the goal concept to be pre sented in an offhand and unobtrusive manner so that the person is not and does not become aware of the potential influence or effect those goal-related stimuli might have on his or her behavior (Bargh, 1992). For example, even though subliminally presented primes related to cooperation did cause partici pants to cooperate on a task more than did the nonprimed control group, participants' subsequent ratings of how much they had wanted and tried to cooperate during the task were uncorrelated with their actual degree of cooperative behavior. Yet the same items administered to participants who had been explicitly (i.e., consciously) instructed to cooperate did significantly correlate with their actual degree of cooperation (Bargh et al., 2001, Experi ment 2). Alternatively, words related to achievement and high performance might be embedded along with other, goal-irrelevant words in a puzzle, or words related to cooperation might be presented subliminally in the course of an ostensible reaction time task. Just as with single types of behavior such as politeness or intelligence, presenting goal-related stimuli in this fashion causes the goal to become active and then operate to guide behavior toward that goal over an extended period of time. People primed with achievement related stimuli perform at higher levels on subsequent tasks than do control groups; those primed with cooperation-related stimuli Cooperate more in a commons-dilemma game; and those primed with evaluation-related stimuli form impressions of other people while those in a control group do not (see review in Chartrand & Bargh, 2002). Such effects are unlikely to be restricted to the laboratory environment; for example. merely thinking about the significant other people in our lives (something we all do quite often) causes the goals we pursue when with them to become active and to then guide our behavior without our choosing or knowing it, even when those individuals are not physically present (Fitz simons & Bargh, 2003). And the nonconscious ideomotor effect of perception on action becomes a matter of widespread social importance when applied to the mass exposure of people to violent behavior on television or in movies (see Hurley, 2002).

40

Fundamental Questions

cal demonstrations that our experience of willing is rooted in a causal attribu tion process that can be experimentally manipulated to produce false experi ences of will. Wegner and Wheatley (1999) reported studies in which participants used a computer mouse to move a cursor around a computer screen filled with pictures of objects. doing so along with another participant (actually a con federate of the experimenters) so that the two of them jointly determined the cursor's location. While they were doing this. the names of the different ob jects were spoken to them one at a time over headphones. Unknown to the actual participant, the confederate was given instructions over his or her headphones from time to time to cause the screen cursor to point to a given object. By manipulating whether the name of the moved-to object had or had not been presented to the participant just (l.e., a second or two) before the cursor landed on it (as opposed to earlier, or after the cursor had landed on it), so that the "thought" about that object had been in the participant's consciousness just prior to the cursor's movement to it, the experimenters were able to manipulate the participant's attributions of personal responsibil ity and control over the cursor's movement. In these experiments, therefore, beliefs about personal agency could be induced by manipulations of the key factors presumed to underlie feelings of will, according to the authors' attribu tional model-even though those factors had not, in fact, been causal in the cursor's movement. Such findings demonstrate that people do not and cannot have direct ac cess to acts of causal intention and choice. Kenneth Bowers (1984) had an ticipated this finding when he pointed out that it is "the purpose of psycholog ical research to enhance our comprehension and understanding of causal influences operating on thought and action. Notice, however, that such re search would be totally redundant if the causal connections linking thought and behavtor to its determinants were directly and automatically self-evident to introspection" (p. 250). Within (especially social) psychology. a further reason for the widely held belief in a free, undetermined will is the contrast often made between auto matic (nonconscious, implicit) and controlled (conscious, explicit) cognitive processes in the many dual-process models of social (and nonsocial) psycho logical phenomena (see Chaiken & Trope, 1999). Here. automatic processes are seen as determined, mechanistic, and externally (environmentally) trig gered, while controlled processes are largely seen as their antithesis, leading to an implicit understanding of them as internally instigated and somehow undetermined and without mechanism. But it is another logical error to con sider only automatic processes as caused and having underlying mechanisms, while controlled processes (somehow) do not, and are thus "free" (see Bargh & Ferguson, 2000). Regardless, this implicit belief in the uncaused. almost metaphysical nature of conscious or controlled mental processes has existed
42 Fundamental Questions

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in psychology for some time. Indeed, it was the main reason for their rejection as psychological phenomena by behaviorism, an irony noted many years ago by Donald Campbell (1969): The stubborn certainty I find in my experimental psychologist [behaviorist] friends on this point bespeaks not only a naive realism ... but also a men talistic dualism. They tend to forget that thinking. decision making, or ra tional inference is carried out by brain tissue fully as much as are auto matic reactions. They tend to think of them instead as purely mental. (pp. 64-65)

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Neuropsychological Mechanisms of Nonwnscious Control

Thus far I have argued for the existence of sophisticated nonconscious moni toring and control systems that can guide behavior over extended periods of time in a changing environment, in pursuit of desired goals. Recent neuropsy chological evidence, reviewed in this section, is consistent with these claims, as well as with the core proposition that conscious intention and behavioral (motor) systems are fundamentally dissociated in the brain. In other words, the evidence shows that much if not most of the workings of the motor sys tems that guide action are opaque to conscious access (see Prinz. 2003). This helps greatly to demystify the notion of nonconscious social behavior, be cause such a dissociation between motoric behavior and conscious awareness is now emerging as a basic structural feature of the human brain. The brain structure that has emerged as the primary locus of automatic. nonconsciously controlled motor programs is the cerebellum, and specifically the neocerebellum (Thach, 1996). With frequent and consistent experience ofthe same behaviors in the same environmental context, this brain structure links the representations of those specific behavioral contexts with the rele vant premotor, lower level movement generators. In this way, complex be havior can be mapped onto specific environmental features and contexts and so be guided automatically by informational input by the environment (i.e.. bypassing the need for conscious control and guidance). Critically. cerebellar output extends even to the main planning area of the brain, the prefrontal cortex, providing a plausible neurological basis for the operation of auto matic, nonconscious action plans (e.g., Bargh & Gollwitzer, 1994). As Thach (1996) concludes from his review of research on the role and function of the cerebellum, "[it] may be involved in combining these cellular elements, so that, through practice, an experiential context can automatically evoke an action plan" (p, 428). . Evidence from the study of brain evolution also points to an important role b the (neo)cerebellum in the deliberate acquisition of new skills (see Donald, '2001, pp. 191-197). A major advance in human cognitive capacity and
Bypassing the Will 43

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capability was the connection between the prefrontal cortex and the neocere bellum, which increased in size by a factor of five. This expanded pathway enables nonconscious control over higher executive mental processes, be cause it connects the main cerebellar receiving areas in the brain stem with the frontal tertiary cortex (two levels of analysis removed from direct sensa tion). This part of the cortex receives inputs only from secondary analysis areas of the brain (which take input only from other mental representations and not from sensory organs), and thus is entirely buffered from direct sensory areas. "The fact that these pathways are connected to high level cognitive re gions places the cerebellum in a strategic location .... The overwhelming size of this connection to the prefrontal areas suggests an important executive role, probably in the generation of automated programs of executive control" (Donald, 2001. pp. 196-197). Hence, there appears to be a sound anatomi cal basis for the notion of nonconscious guidance of higher mental processes, such as interpersonal behavior and sophisticated goal pursuit.

Dissociations Between Mental Systems for "Knowing" versus "Doing"

Several lines of cognitive neuroscience research support the idea of a dissocia tion between conscious awareness and intention, on the one hand, and the operation of complex motor and goal representations on the other (Prinz, 2003). One major area of such research focuses on the distinct and separate visual input pathways devoted to perception versus action.

Separate Visual Input Pathways The first such evidence came from a study of patients with lesions in specific brain regions (Goodale, Milner, Jakobsen, & Carey, 1991). Those with lesions in the parietal lobe region could identify an object but not reach for it correctly based on its spatial orientation (such as a book in a horizontal versus vertical position), whereas those with lesions in the ventral-visual system could not recognize or identify the item but were nonetheless able to reach for it correctly when asked in a casual manner to take it from the experimenter. In other words, the latter group showed appro priate action toward an object in the absence of conscious awareness or knowledge of its presence. Decety and Grezes (1999) and Norman (2002) concluded from this and related evidence that two separate cortical visual pathways are activated dur ing the perception of human movement: a dorsal one for action tendencies based on that information, and a ventral one used for understanding and recognition of it. The dorsal system operates mainly outside of conscious awareness. while the workings of the ventral system are normally accessible to consciousness. [eannerod (2003) has similarly argued that there exist two different representations of the same object. one "pragmatic" and the other
44 Fundamental Questions

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"semantic." The former are actional, used for interacting with the object: the latter are for knowing about and identifying the object. Thus the dorsal stream (or activated pragmatic representation) could drive behavior in response to environmental stimuli in the absence of conscious awareness or understanding of that external information. It could, in princi ple, support a nonconscious basis for action that is primed or driven by the current or recent behavioral informational input from others-in other words. be a neurological basis for the chameleon effect of nonconscious imitation of the behavior of one's interaction partners (Chartrand & Bargh, 1999). More over, the discovery of "mirror neurons," first in macaque monkeys (Rizzo lattl & Arbib, 1998) and now in humans (Buccino et al., 2001)-in which simply watching mouth, hand, and foot movements activates the same func tionally specific regions of the premotor cortex as when performing those same movements oneself-is further compelling evidence for a direct connec tion between visual information and action control (see also Woody & Sadler. 1998). Taken together, these findings implicate the parietal cortex as a potential candidate for the location of (social) priming effects. Recall that Goodale et al. (1991) had concluded from their patients that those with lesions in the parietal lobe region could identify an object but not reach for it correctly, but those with intact parietal lobes but lesions in the ventral-visual system could reach for it correctly even though they could not recognize or identify it. Lhermitte's patients had intact parietal cortices that enabled them to act, but solely upon the behavioral suggestions afforded by the environmental situa tions or objects (i.e., primes).

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Lack oj Conscious Access to Operating Behavior Procedures Related to this exis tence of a visual input pathway directly connected to the action system and relatively inaccessible to conscious awareness is that there is also minimal if any conscious access to any operating motor system (see review in Frith et al., 2000). This research is showing, to a startling degree. just how unaware we are of how we move and make movements in space. Again, this evidence is consistent with the proposition that our behavior can be outside of con scious guidance and control. A person cannot possibly think about and be consciously aware of all of the individual muscle actions in compound and sequential movements-there are too many of them and they are too fast (see. e.g., Thach, 1996). Therefore they can occur only through some process that is automatic and subcon scious. Empirical support for this conclusion comes from a study by Fourneret and [eannerod (1998). Participants attempted to trace a line displayed on a computer monitor, but with their drawing hand hidden from them by a mir ror. Thus they were not able to see how their hand actually moved in order to reproduce the drawing; they had to refer to a graphical representation of
Bypassing the Will 45

that movement on a computer monitor in front of them. However, unknown to the participants, substantial bias had been programmed into the transla tion of their actual movement into that which was displayed on the screen, so that the displayed line did not actually move in the same direction as had their drawing hand. Despite this, all participants felt and reported great confidence that their hand had indeed moved in the direction shown on the screen. This could only have occurred if normal participants have little or no direct conscious access to their actual hand movements.

Dissociations Between Intention and Action Within Working Memory

Under the original concept of working memory as a unitary short-term store, or that portion of long-term memory that was currently in conscious aware ness (e.g., Atkinson & Shlffrin, 1968), the idea of nonconscious operation of working memory structures was incoherent at best. If working memory was a single mental "organ" that held both the current goal and purpose, along with the relevant environmental information on which that goal was acting, then one should always be aware of the intention or goal that is currently residing in active, working memory. There cannot be dissociations within the operations of the same mental structure. Yet such dissociations do in fact exist between conscious intention and behavior, even complex social behavior as exhibited by Lhermitte's patients, and it is these dissociations that are most relevant to understanding the mechanisms underlying nonconscious social behavior and goal pursuit. Such complex behavior, which is continually responsive to ongoing environmental events and coordinated with the behavior of others, has to involve the opera tion of the brain structures that support working memory-namely the fron tal and prefrontal cortex. But if working memory contents are accessible to conscious awareness (d. chapter 8, this volume), how can such dissociations exist? The answer to this apparent paradox, of course, is that working memory is not a single unitary structure. This idea was originally proposed by Badde ley and Hitch (1974; see also Baddeley, 1986), who envisaged a system com prising multiple components, not just for the temporary storage of informa tion (the phonological loop and visuospatial scratchpad) but also for the direction and allocation of limited attention (the "central executive"). In a parallel development, psychiatrists working with patients with frontal lobe damage-the frontal lobes being brain structures underlying the executive control functions of working memory (Baddeley, 1986)-were noting how the behavioral changes associated with frontal lobe damage were exceedingly complex and variable, depending on the exact locations of the damage (Mesu
46 Fundamental Questions

plans were stored in the same location (or if there were conscious access to all of the operations of working memory; see chapter 8), so that awareness of one's intention was solely a matter of conscious access to the currently operative goal or behavior program, then it would be difficult to see how nonconscious control over social behavior could be possible. This finding alone-a dissociation within working memory itself between conscious inten tion and action-has the potential to remove much of the mystery behind the nonconsclous activation and guidance of complex social behavior and goal pursuit. The storage of current intentions in brain locations that are anatomi cally separate from their associated and currently operating action programs would appear to be nothing less than the neural basis for non conscious goal pursuit and other forms of unintended behavior.

Similarities of Priming and Hypnosis

The classic phenomenon demonstrating a dissociation between conscious will and behavior is hypnosis. Here too, the phenomenon has long been seen as magical and mysterious, and in fact was often featured in carnival and county fair magic shows, in which subjects were somehow induced to do bizarre and even superhuman acts. But hypnosis is also used today as an alternative to anesthesia, such that the patient feels no pain although under going a normally quite painful procedure. In reviewing the hypnosis litera ture up to that point, Sarbin and Coe (1972) remarked on how the many behaviors induced by hypnotic means violate our expectations of the normal limits of human behavior, which we normally think of as being under our own control: [This] aspect of the hypnotic situation creates surprise and puzzlement. How can we account for the apparent magnitude of response to sucha benign stimulus? How can only a verbal request bring about so dramatic a change as analge sia to the surgeon's scalpel? ... The tendency is to interpret these exagger ated responses as being almost magical. (p. 17, italics in original) The various modern theories of hypnosis, such as those of Hilgard (1986), Woody and Bowers (1994), and Kihlstrom (e.g., 1998) are dissociation theo ries of one sort or another; Hilgard and Kihlstrom propose that the person does not experience the control of his or her own behavior, while Woody and Bowers argued that hypnosis may alter not just the self-perception of the control of one's behavior but the actual nature of that control (dissociated control theory). In this theory, highly hypnotizable people's subsystems of control may be relatively directly or automatically accessed, without be

48

Fundamental Questions

measures? What is the nature of this power of activated concepts over our judgments and behavior?

The Acquisition of Behavioral Concepts in Young Children

To answer this question, we must turn to how concepts develop in young children in the first place. According to the influential research and theories of Vygotsky (1934/1962) and Luria (1961), learning a concept involves in voking it, linking it with the performance procedure and external information for which it stands. This is Vygotsky's "outside-inside" principle: Symbolic thought first represents external action, and only later becomes internal speech (l.e., thought; see Bruner, 1961; Donald, 2001, p. 250). Vygotsky argued that concepts and functions exist for the child first in the social or interpersonal sphere and only later are internalized as intrapsychic concepts (see Wertsch, 1985, p. 64). Thus, according to this framework, the child learns behavioral concepts initially by having them paired by the caretaker with the observable, external features of those behaviors. In this way, the early learning of behavior con cepts is linked to the perceptual features of that behavior, to what it means to behave in that certain way. The strong associations formed in early devel opment between the perceptual features of a type of social behavior and the behavior concept itself is likely a major contributor to the spontaneous behav ior-to-trait inference effect documented by Uleman and his colleagues (e.g., chapter 14, this volume). But social behavior and goal-priming research reverses this effect, by pres enting synonyms of the concept under scrutiny and assessing whether the participant then behaves in that manner. Thus not only must concepts be learned by the young child in terms of their external observable features ("That is a polite boy"; "That was a mean thing to say"). but they also must be strongly associated with the behavioral procedures or action systems used to behave in that same way oneself. This was, in fact, another important part of the theory. According to Luria (1961. p. 17), it is through these behavior concepts that the parent or caretaker controls the very young child's behav ior, naming objects and giving orders and instructions using behavior con cepts. It is through the use of words that he or she steers the child's behavior. In this way, the behavior concept becomes strongly-and directly-associated with the mental representation of how to behave that way. Note also that at this young age there is not a matter of choice or personal selection of the behavior. The child is not given an option: the behavior word is understood as an imperative and obligatory act to be performed. Luria (1961, p. 52) called this the "impellant or initiating function of speech." Thus the linkage, in early learning, of the concept with the behavioral procedure
50 Fundamental Questions

Implications for the Purpose of Consciousness

There is a baffling problem about what consciousness is for. It is equally baffling, moreover, that the function of consciousness should remain so baffling. It seems extraordinary that despite the pervasiveness and familiar ity of consciousness in our lives, we are uncertain in what way (if at all) it is actually indispensable to us. (Frankfurt, 1988, p. 162) What is consciousness for, if perfectly unconscious, indeed subiectless, in formation processing is in principle capable of achieving all the ends for which conscious minds were supposed to exist? (Dennett, 1981. p. 13) I have argued here that conscious acts of will are not necessary determi nants of social judgment and behavior: neither are conscious processes neces sary for the selection of complex goals to pursue, or for the guidance of those goals to completion. Goals and motivations can be triggered by the environ ment, without conscious choice or intention. then operate and run to comple tion entirely nonconsciously, guiding complex behavior in interaction with a changing and unpredictable environment, and producing outcomes identical to those that occur when the person is aware of having that goal (see review in Chartrand & Bargh, 2002). But this is not to say that consciousness does not exist or is merely an epiphenomenon. It just means that if all of these things can be accomplished without conscious choice or guidance. then the purpose of consciousness (i.e.. why it evolved) probably lies elsewhere. In an important (if indirect) way, then, research on nonconscious forms of social cognition. motivation. and behavior speaks to the question of what consciousness is for, by eliminating some of the more plausible and widely held candidates. If we are capable of doing something effectively through nonconscious means, that something would likely not be the primary func tion for which we evolved consciousness. For example, the fact that automatic goal pursuit involves monitoring the (perceived) environment and guidance or control Over extended time periods of one's responses to it (e.g.. Bargh et al., 2001) suggests that consciousness is not necessary for online monitoring and control, as is widely held by con temporary models of metacognition (e.g., Nelson, 1996; Paris, 2001). Of course, one can be meta-aware of one's perceptions. thoughts. and actions (monitoring) and also be aware of guiding those thoughts and actions toward a goal (control). but if this guidance can also occur without conscious aware ness and intent. then these capabilities do not distinguish conscious from nonconscious processes. Thus online monitoring and control does not seem to be a viable candidate for the reason why we evolved consciousness. But there is a second potential function and benefit of metacognitive awareness-of being aware at an abstract level, all at the same time. of what
52 Fundamental Questions

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Conclusion
Action tendencies can be activated and put into motion without the need for the individual's conscious intervention; even complex social behavior can un fold without an act of will or awareness of its sources. Evidence from a wide variety of domains of psychological inquiry is consistent with this proposition. Behavioral evidence from patients with frontal lobe lesions, behavior and goal-priming studies in social psychology, the dissociated behavior of deeply hypnotized subjects, findings from the study of human brain evolution, cogni tive neuroscience studies of the structure and function of the frontal lobes as well as the separate actional and semantic visual pathways, cognitive psycho logical research on the components of working memory and on the degree of conscious access to motoric behavior-all of these converge on the conclusion that complex behavior and other higher mental processes can proceed inde pendently of the conscious will. Indeed, the brain evolution and neuropsycho logical evidence suggests that the human brain is designed for such indepen dence. These are tentative conclusions at this point. because cognitive neurosci ence research is still in its infancy, and the cognitive psychological study of the underlying mechanisms of behavior and goal-priming effects in social psychology is perhaps in early childhood. But the two literatures clearly speak to each other. Indeed, Posner and DiGirolamo (2000) drew the more general and encompassing conclusion that the information-processing and the neuro physiological levels of analysis have achieved a level of mutual support greater than previously imagined. In opening their review, they remark on "how closely linked the hardware of the brain is to the performance of cognitive and emotional tasks, and the importance of environment and self-regulation to the operations of the human brain" (p. 874). The case of nonconscious social behavior reviewed in this chapter serves as an excellent example of that linkage; the neuropsychological evidence giving greater plausibility to the priming phenomena, and the priming phenomena demonstrating how deeply the neuropsychological phenomena affect the daily life of human be ings.

Acknowledgments Preparation of this chapter was supported in part by a Guggen heim Fellowship, a Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and by the U.S. National Institute for Mental Health (Grant MH60767). I am grateful to Alan Baddeley, Roy Baumeister, Jerome Bruner, Jean Decety, Peter Gollwitzer, Ran Hassin, Denis Phillips, Lee Ross, Jim Uleman, and Dan Weg ner for feedback, comments. and suggestions; thanks also to Melissa Ferguson, Grainne Fitzsimons, Ravit Levy, K. C. McCulloch. Ezequiel Morsella, and Pamela Smith for comments on an earlier version of the manuscript.
54 Fundamental Questions

Note
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1. In fact. early on. Thorndike (1913. p. 105) did attack the ideomotor action principle as "magical thinking," and his criticism effectively stifled scientific re search on ideomotor action for the next 60 years (see Knuf et al., 2001, p, 780).

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56 Fundamental Questions